Who's the bigger offender: Conservatives or Liberals?

I may be wrong, but I don't think Phat wants to answer my questions...

The final fallback value is what you can DO in exchange for food. You can help somebody grow food, for example - which is how civilization began.

When I was a lowly chemistry student, the university used to have a Science Fair every second year. One of my buddies was explaining the instrument room, which was labelled "Quincy's Lab", which will give you some idea of the time frame.My demonstration was three stills: reflux, simple distillation and fractional distillation. Almost every member of the public who came through asked me where they could get the glassware.

Yeah, I got my glassware a few years ago when I was making wine from a bumper crop of Asian pears. I ended up with a really nice pear brandy, but my wife really objected to my project taking over her kitchen. At the time there was a fairly active online community of amateur distillers.In high school our still was much simpler, just a straight glass tube for a water jacket with a smaller tube held in place with rubber stoppers. We got Vicks Formula 44 cough syrup and pour out the syrup and filled it with our 190 proof apricot brandy, the residue cough syrup added a little flavor. We sold it for $5 a bottle to our classmates. Of course they had to dilute it with coke or something. Had a thriving business my junior and senior years.

Flaming Moe!

Hack! Ack!Dude! That is 95% ethyl. The fumes alone will peel paint. After all that alcohol there's no room left for the apricot. Burn out your sinuses and your memory banks at the same time.I've had Everclear 190. Use it as a mix-drink base. Just once I had to take a shot. One of the dumbest things I've ever done to my poor mouth, throat, lungs. The burn of the fumes alone nearly knocked me out.Those were good times.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Somebody set up a distilling experiment in the high school chemistry lab, since that is a valid chemistry technique (eg, in Outlander we see Claire distilling ether). Nobody was allowed to drink it, but I remember a strong bread smell. I've been having a lot of thoughts about that of late, one of my many Gedankenexperimenten.First, there was a short series on Netflix, Chug, in which the owner of a rum distillery (reminded me of the actor, Jake Johnson) traveled the world learning about (and getting wasted on) the local traditional alcoholic drinks. In the Czech Republic he visited a Schnapps distillery which they had him man. The boiler and condenser were connected by a hose. At first you leave them disconnected so you can smell the vapor coming out of the boiler. The methanol (bad poisonous) boils off first, followed by the ethanol (good poisonous -- it's still slow poison, but it's what we want), so the moment you stop smelling methanol and start smelling ethanol then you connect the hose to the condenser. Chug was on Netflix long ago and my Roku search cannot find it anywhere now. It was just six episodes, which as I said was mainly him researching into traditional drinks and drinking customs around the world, which invariably led to him getting wasted. But the interesting one was in Austria and Eastern Europe. Besides the Schnapps, he sampled various forms of corrected coffee (ie, sweetened with booze) in Cafe Sperl (personal memories of that place; it's one of the settings in the series, Vienna Blood) and learned the story of liqueurs.Monks would grow and use herbs as medicine, but herbs wilt and spoil. When we learned of distilled alcohol from the Muslims (aqua vitae), the monks found that the alcohol preserved the herbs, very greatly extending its shelf life. However, you couldn't drink the stuff, so they added sugar and flavorings to help the medicine go down. Out of that grew a variety of liqueurs, many of which were associated with monasteries. In addition, he encountered a holiday Schnapps based on a family recipe including pine and spices, etc, resulting in Xmas in a shot glass. 
On the technical side, I'd been contemplating phase changes. When boiling a liquid, after it reaches its boiling point then the liquid stops getting hotter since all additional heat just converts more of the liquid to vapor more quickly thus holding the liquid at the boiling point. Same thing with melting ice in that additional heat only serves to melt the ice but not get the liquid hotter so ideally as long as you still have ice in your drink it will remain cold. That is what we were taught in high school chemistry class.In practical terms, we depend on water's phase change to cook foods at a constant temperature (ie, 212°F) by boiling it. Just boiling water keeps the cooking temperature constant, but since the phase change of oil is much higher we need to use a thermometer to control the temperature when cooking with oil. Also, in preparation for my grandsons' future kitchen safety training, I cooked a sealed meal in the microwave and immediately inserted my thermometer through the plastic: the temperature of the steam was read at about 212°F. A temperature of 140°F can be enough to scald you, which is why you need to be careful when removing the film from microwaved food.

I use Everclear to make dilutions, usually 80% to store aquatic insect specimens.I have never taken a shot of anything more the 151 rum, just enough of the 190 to wet the inside of my mouth and that was enough. I'm sure most of my high school customers tried the straight stuff too. Alcohol can be deadly if misused.These days I just have sips of something flavorful a couple times a month, usually a nice tawny port.

I did a lot of library research in high school about the techniques of making many of the common forms of alcohol. It was the subject of an English class oral report (my English teacher was married to my chemistry teacher, so I lost easy access to supplies after that). My countertop distillation apparatus is set up with a calibrated thermometer so I can monitor when each fraction comes off. The solution stays at 148.5F while the methanol is boiling, when the temperature gets to 173F I know the ethanol is coming off. I discard everything that comes off before 173F. Then I redistill the distillate to remove any residual methanol.I use distilled water and other flavoring ingredients to dilute the final distillate down to a drinkable level. I have always preferred wines from other fruits rather than grapes to make brandy, mine are more like cordials.When I was old enough to legally buy alcohol one of the first liquors I tried was Hiram Walker's Apricot Cordial. It was only 30% but perfect for sipping after dinner. It had almost a caramelly odor and flavor. They don't sell it in Oregon anymore, but I found some in Chicago on my trip last summer. It's now called apricot brandy, but it is the same smell and taste that transports me back to 1968.

Kind of reminds me of an early episode of Breaking Bad where they "go shopping" in the school's chemistry supply room to build their cooking setup. Which I keep hearing is the origin of our mixed drinks, mainly from Prohibition when the booze was of such horribly poor quality that they needed to mix it with something (or lots of somethings) just to make it drinkable.I also heard decades ago on NPR one of the origin stories for the margarita, this one told by the grandson or so of the purported inventor. Hollywood stars loved to go down to Ensenada to party, which included drinking tequila. One, reportedly Marjorie Main, wanted to drink but she couldn't tolerate tequila straight. So the bar owner diluted the tequila down and named the new drink after her. Alton Brown offers a different origin story which at least accounts for the main ingredients that go into it.Personally, I never went through a bar phase so I never learned mixed drinks. Instead, my drinking is normally ale, red wine, or straight tequila, scotch (single-malt Islay), or bourbon. In Germany I discovered Schnapps, which are unaged brandies -- I prefer Obst (apples and pears), Kirsch (cherries) is acceptable, but Korn (grain) tasted like rubbing alcohol ("better quality" vodka, such as Ketel One, also rub me the wrong way with that same isopropyl taste). Cordials are OK, but only in small quantities, plus I have virtually no experience with them (I once tried St. Germaine, which was rather strange).Trying to find Schnapps in the USA has always been difficult. First "shnaps" is just grain alcohol mixed into some sweet syrup so it's not the same thing -- "Peppermint Schnapps" was the first clue. The best I could do was Hiram Walker's Kirschwasser, which was OK. Then for several years BevMo started carrying imported Obstwasser, but it's been a few years since I've seen it there.  Where one of my ponderings about phase changes led me was something like this (using the temperatures you just gave):

1. A mixture contains liquids each with different boiling points; eg, methanol at 148.5°F, ethanol at 173°F, and water at 212°F.
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2. When the temperature gets up to 148.5°, the methanol starts to boil off. However, since we're at a phase change, the rest of the mixture does not continue to heat up keeping the other liquids from starting to boil.
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3. Once the methanol is gone, the mixture continues to heat up to the boiling point of the next liquid, ethanol (173°), and holds at that temperature because we're at another phase change.
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4. Once the ethanol is gone, the mixture continues to heat up to the boiling point of the next liquid, water (212°), and holds at that temperature because we're at another phase change.

Of course, it's not that simple, but I think that's generally a good way to think about it.I arrived at that while writing the "how things work" section of my page on Kent Hovind's bogus solar-mass-loss claim (Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim). Basically:

• The sun's core has to reach certain temperatures for various elements to start to fuse. Hydrogen has the lowest temperature to fuse, helium needs it hotter, carbon even hotter, etc.
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• The sun's size is regulated through hydrodynamic equilibrium: the sun's mass is compressing it, which heats up the core, while the fusion reaction presses outward, which cools down the core. The rate of the fusion reaction is proportional to the core's temperature raised to the fourth power, which makes the fusion reaction very sensitive to the core's temperature.
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• While in the hydrogen-fusing stage, the core cannot increase to the temperature needed to fuse helium because as soon as the temperature would go up hydrodynamic equilibrium would drive it back down.
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• The only way we know of for the sun to advance to the helium-fusion stage would be for hydrogen fusion to stop or slow down for lack of any more fuel. At that point, gravitational collapse would no longer be held in check and the core could then heat up to the trigger temperature for helium fusion to start. Because the radiative pressure would be somewhat greater that with hydrogen fusion and because the sun's mass is the same (actually, slightly less now) the size of the sun would be much greater.
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  Actually, since helium nuclei can pack more tightly than hydrogen, the sun's core is slowly becoming more dense, hence hotter, hence the fusion reaction runs faster. As a result, the sun's diameter is slowly growing (not shrinking!) -- the only figure I've seen for the rate of growth is about an inch a year.

I offered that to justify examining hydrogen fusion and not, say, iron fusion, because there's no known way for the solar core's temperature to increase to anything remote close to their trigger temperatures. And then while reviewing my mental notes (instead of just falling asleep at night) it occurred to me that the same basic ideas -- including the role and non-role of phase changes in cooking with water/steam and oil -- must also apply in distilling.

In retrospect, I can't argue with you. Even though they say that money makes the world go around, and even though precious metals may preserve your value of what little or lot that you DO have, it wont do much good in a famine. Preppers take note. Helping someone grow food is noble. I wont help anyone make alcohol, however...though if my reset/depression theory comes true, lots of you will need some...since you don't believe Jesus exists! But you will tell me again and again and again that I dont do what He says, so im not following that Rabbit Trail any longer.Cheers

You do realize precious metals fluctuate in value and do not always increase in value, don't you?

Oh I Do! I just have not had time recently...but I have them typed out on Word Pad and will make a note to answer them tonite when I get off work. It's only fair.

Of course! And mark my words....they will be valuable n this next global reset/depression. They are countercyclical insurance. Dont tell me you don't see the Ice Burg.Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

More valuable than now? Why? Who will want them? And will the value be $1997 or $43 or 10 loaves of bread per ounce?It seems to me that the only people who would value them are buyers, but what will they use to pay for them?